Webflow Data from own API

Community resources Webflow Tips
1

It would seem no one is really helpful when it comes to try and guide individuals to connect their webflow designs to their own API sources.
The solution apart from the usual mention of CORS that most don’t know how to solve will revert to my solution, the steps I take are as follows:

  1. Do the Design as per Tutorial with the Collections.
  2. do the Sample data structure you will have in your API in the Collections CMS as data.
  3. Export the code to self hosting, as you would, usually to the same server you have your API on, Same Domain at least.
  4. Change the URL for the data from the webflow link to your local link.
    If all the fields map the same, it should work.
    Any changes you do to your design will need to change the url again, you could write a processing script to do this for you, if you continually export and publish to your own server.

The next problem to solve is Header Tokens. I am working on this, but might be a programmer level unfortunatly. I had high hopes but the webflow process is ending up taking me more time than if I simply went Figma->coder
Maybe there is plugin somewhere I missed that will do this. or at least help, and if there is let me know, maybe use one of the service providers follow their tutorial, and once working switch the url to your own api.

2

I’ve seen many hundreds of posts on this exact topic, if you search the forum you’ll find a lot of useful information. However when you’re asking a general engineering problem like “how do I build a house” the details of your requirements matter a lot.

The popular answer for no-coders is to invest in a nocode platform like Wized + Xano, so that you can access and secure your data. Or for some scenarios, you can use Powerimporter Pro or Whalesync to synchronize your CMS with external data, and then you just access the CMS as usual.

The popular tools / strategies for coders include serverless functions, reverse proxies and workers, hosted databases like Supabase, site exports and custom back-end builds, and DevLink to react builds.

You’ll need to really understand your problems and goals well in order to choose the right tools for the system you want to build - performance needs, security requirements, database size, transfer volume, how your data is integrated… these are all part of that engineering.